Message from the CEO
My Mission: Achieving Medium- to Long-Term Growth
Toward “Joy for Life—Bringing
Joy to the Future by Food”
My Convictions upon Assuming the Presidency
On April 1, 2025, I assumed the role of president & CEO, and on June 25, I was appointed representative director. My mission is to carry forth the solid management foundation built by Chairman Sato and to deliver medium- to long-term growth. Reflecting on our nearly 200-year history—during which our predecessors overcame hardships and resolved numerous challenges—I am deeply aware of the responsibility of carrying the baton now passed to my generation. At the same time, I am determined to embrace external changes as opportunities and, through business transformation and development of new domains, to drive the J-Oil Mills Group toward becoming a company capable of robust growth, thereby realizing our vision: “Joy for Life—Bringing Joy to the Future by Food.”
Allow me to briefly share my background and perspective. I began my career in the life sciences industry, working in a factory, as I had asked to do. For seven years, I was engaged in production planning, coordination between sales and operations, and cost accounting. Later, in corporate planning and other company departments, I gained experience as project leader for various initiatives. My leadership style crystallized when I was dispatched as CFO to a U.S. company we had acquired. Initially, as a manager sent from a Japanese parent company, I faced skepticism and a tense atmosphere. Nevertheless, I engaged in repeated discussions with local staff to formulate and implement post-acquisition business plans. I came to realize the high level of expertise each staff member possessed, and by setting individual goals that leveraged their strengths, we gradually built momentum. By accumulating “quick wins,” the organizational climate changed, and we began to move forward smoothly as one team. This experience taught me that leadership means drawing on each member’s expertise to create results greater than the sum of the parts. I have adopted the personal mantra of “working together with one heart and one mind,” and this will guide me as I fulfill my responsibilities as CEO.
I believe there are four key elements to corporate management: the management team, led by the CEO and executive officers, must (1) repeatedly communicate our vision to employees to gain their empathy and foster unity across the company; (2) formulate medium- to long-term management policies and strategies; (3) develop and execute strategies and tactics for each business in line with those policies and strategies; and (4) strengthen the management foundation needed to realize them. I joined the Company in 2022 as a finance fellow. Since then, I have been in charge of corporate functions, which meant that my contact with frontline sales and production, as well as with external business partners and customers, was limited—this is an issue I recognized for myself. To address it, internally I have been holding briefing and dialogue sessions for employees, continuously sharing management’s views while also receiving proposals from employees, thereby fostering the kind of communication that unifies the entire company as described in element (1). Externally, since the February 2025 announcement of the leadership transition, I have visited customers and business partners together with Chairman Sato to explain the new management structure. Through these visits, I have once again realized that building very strong relationships with our customers and partners is one of our strengths. Based on this foundation of trust, I intend to lead the company forward as CEO so that we can achieve business growth together with our customers and partners.
FY2024 Performance and Achievements
In FY2024, although sales declined, operating profit reached a new record high of ¥8.57 billion. We also saw improvement in key indicators under the Sixth Medium- Term Business Plan, including ROE. That said, with the PBR at only 0.63 times, I recognize this is far from a satisfactory level of corporate value. We will move swiftly to put in place growth strategies and reinforce our management base, with the aim of further enhancing ROE and PER.
During the year, we responded to external changes such as raw material price volatility by ensuring sales at appropriate prices, while strengthening solution-based sales that combine oils and fats and food materials to meet the diverse needs of business-use customers. This enabled us to expand sales volume, particularly of high-value-added products such as long-lasting oils, seasoning and cooking oils, and starches that produce “Good Taste” by enhancing taste and juiciness. In household-use oils, we expanded our Smart Green Pack lineup—characterized by reduced environmental impact and ease of use—and enriched our product portfolio, thereby increasing market share.
On structural reforms, we exited the domestic household-use margarine business, while improving profitability in business-use margarines by shifting production overseas. In addition, we enhanced asset efficiency by reducing inventories through value chain optimization and selling cross-shareholdings, thereby raising ROIC.
That said, I recognize that the pace of cultivating growth domains, including overseas businesses, remains an issue. From the next fiscal year onward, we will step up initiatives to accelerate growth.
J-Oil Mills’ Value Proposition
As I mentioned at the outset, our company has a history spanning nearly 200 years. This longevity is the result of steadily evolving the value we provide in response to changing values and needs over time. Today, perceptions of food, “good taste,” and health are undergoing significant change. Looking at the food industry’s business environment from a medium- to long-term perspective, we foresee challenges such as declining demand due to Japan’s shrinking population, and heightened risks to the continuity and cost of energy and raw material procurement stemming from climate change and sharp currency fluctuations. At the same time, however, we also anticipate opportunities for new market expansion, driven by rising awareness of sustainability, growth in the elderly population in Japan, and advances in kitchen technology and food tech, all of which are reshaping the values and needs surrounding food.
To respond to these changes in the business environment, we must further pursue our strength in “Oishisa Design (creating deliciousness).” By acquiring new competitiveness, including through alliances with other companies and M&A where appropriate, we will further enhance our ability to provide solutions that address issues related to food. In doing so, we aim to realize our vision of “bringing joy to people, society, and the environment through good taste, health, and low burden,” thereby contributing to society, the environment, and consumers’ lives.
In 2023, we reviewed our materiality and reorganized it into four key themes. With the new management structure now in place, we have judged it necessary to focus even more on areas such as advancing our business portfolio, accelerating overseas expansion, and strengthening our management foundation, including human capital development. For these areas, we are delving deeper, setting new KPIs, and promoting initiatives to connect our materiality with both the business environment and our strategies in a more explicit manner.
In addition, by adding the perspective of promoting and strengthening sustainability management toward medium- to long-term growth and enhancement of corporate value, we will respond swiftly and reliably to changes in the business environment and society. In this era of rapid change, the risk of being unable to set out a long-term growth strategy has increased compared with the past. We recognize that non-financial information is a key factor in ensuring that stakeholders, including shareholders and investors, view us as a sustainable company, and we consider improving ESG evaluations to be extremely important. Among these areas, this fiscal year we will particularly focus on promoting initiatives for human capital. Human capital management generally includes (1) human resource development, (2) health management and well-being, and (3) diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I). These are key drivers of sustainable growth, including the innovation, and we see them not only as enhancing each employee’s growth and job satisfaction, but also as raising the overall strength of the organization.
One of the areas we want to work on going forward is to define with greater clarity and granularity what we aim to be in the next five or ten years, working backward from our long-term and universal vision. By doing so, we can make the input elements in our value creation process more tangible, and demonstrate a persuasive story both inside and outside the company regarding business portfolio advancement, next-generation technologies, and capital allocation for business investment. At the core of our value creation process, and our differentiating strength, is the ability to provide “Oishisa Design.” In addition to solid points of contact with a wide range of ready-made meal and restaurant customers through sales of oils and fats, we are able to offer solutions that combine oils and fats with our proprietary starches, typified by the “TXdeSIGN” series, which can be applied to nearly all processed foods to address a variety of customer issues. To advance our business portfolio, in addition to the experience and know-how gained through solution proposals to date, it will be important to analyze and understand “Good Taste”—which professional chefs have traditionally identified through their skills and experience—from a scientific perspective, and to elevate our “Oishisa Design” into organizational knowledge by systematizing it into a database. This will further strengthen our ability to offer solutions based on “Oishisa Design.” Beyond responding to customers’ explicit needs, we aim to differentiate ourselves by making unique proposals initiated by our company, using the database to address latent issues that customers themselves may not yet recognize. We are also considering building new business models that make use of the knowledge accumulated through “Oishisa Design.”
Growth Strategy
As we move forward with the Sixth Medium-Term Business Plan, we have reviewed our management structure. In light of major changes in the external environment, we adopted a flat organizational structure based on the concept of thinking and responding together as a team. The intent is to improve the speed of decision-making for overall optimization. In the new management team, each executive officer is responsible not only for initiatives aimed at achieving the annual budget, but also for serving as the lead or a participant in important medium- to long-term themes such as growth strategy and corporate culture reform. Incentives have been added by linking the outcomes of these initiatives to executive compensation. In this way, we believe we can further strengthen the perspective of companywide optimization and medium- to long-term management. The new management team also shares the recognition that strengthening the management foundation is a priority. By reinforcing not only financial capital but also non-financial capital—human capital, natural capital, intellectual capital, manufacturing capital, and social relationship capital—we aim to realize sustainable medium- to long-term growth.
In particular, we will accelerate initiatives on human capital this fiscal year. In FY2023, we established a Human Capital Subcommittee under the Sustainability Committee and formulated a Human Capital Policy, thereby shifting toward human capital management. In today’s uncertain times, it is crucial to focus on developing human resources, promoting diversity, and reforming organizational culture to build organizational strength that can respond flexibly to change, while also achieving both employees’ self-fulfillment and enhancement of our corporate value. Accordingly, with the inauguration of the new management team, on April 1, 2025, we dissolved the Human Capital Subcommittee of the Sustainability Committee and established the Human Resources Committee as an advisory body to the Management Committee. Going forward, we will examine the ideal human capital portfolio in light of our medium- to long- term strategy and advance human capital management to achieve it.
As part of initiatives for strengthening our management foundation, we are also working on dX*. Last year, we established a promotion framework centered on management and business leaders, and set four reform themes with each executive officer in charge serving as a leader: business process reform, SCM/ distribution, sales and marketing, and human resource development. The dX we are aiming for is not limited to simple operational improvements, but rather seeks to realize our vision and mission through transformation encompassing businesses, products and services, and business models, including the systematization of “Oishisa Design” into a database to establish a comparative advantage. In FY2025, we will focus on building the foundation for this by driving transformation in each theme through the use of digital technologies.
* We write “dX” with an emphasis on the “X” to highlight “transformation in operations” as the true objective, rather than focusing just on the tool of digitalization.
With respect to progress under the Sixth Medium- Term Business Plan, we believe that strengthening profitability in existing businesses is proceeding steadily at present. On the other hand, advancing the business portfolio and promoting overseas business remain key issues, and we will focus our efforts in these areas. One example of our investment in next-generation technologies and businesses is the March 2025 press conference on a flight using domestically produced SAF generated from non-edible plant seeds. This is a long-term initiative, and we intend to continue exploring seeds of opportunity while monitoring changes in the external environment.
Regarding the priority issue of overseas business promotion, in the ASEAN region, at our subsidiary J-OIL MILLS (THAILAND) Co., Ltd., we have begun offering new solutions that combine oils and fats and starches, steadily producing results. At Premium Fats Sdn Bhd, we are expanding sales of margarine and shortening. In North America, we are focusing on exports of “MAMENORI SAN edible soybean sheets” and vitamin K2 “menatto.” To further strengthen our business there, we have initiated collaboration with a local company and assigned our own personnel locally. Through this collaboration, in addition to expanding sales of our existing products, we aim to build a win–win relationship in which we also contribute to the partner’s business development and expansion while promoting the development and commercialization of new oil and fat products of our own. Going forward, as we advance the business portfolio, we plan to expand the concept of “Oishisa Design” in overseas businesses as well, establishing our positioning by addressing customer issues through a diverse array of materials and services.
To Our Stakeholders
Under the leadership of Chairman Sato, we achieved a recovery in performance and accomplished a revival, while also building a solid management foundation in our existing businesses. Our commitment to achieving the goals of the Sixth Medium-Term Business Plan remains unchanged, but as some aspects of our growth strategy have shifted from the original assumptions, we will move forward with a sense of urgency, including those changes, to realize medium- to long-term growth. To achieve sustainable growth, we will advance the initiatives necessary to foster human resources capable of leading business transformation and to build an organizational culture that acts autonomously.
Looking ahead to the Company’s growth and sustainable development, we will steadily implement initiatives on near-term materiality, respond swiftly and reliably to changes in society, and become a company of true value to our stakeholders, including investors, thereby building strong relationships of trust.
I ask for your continued support of our endeavors.